One True Thing Read Online Free PDF Page B

have to be overweight to have your mother suggest you need to lose weight shows the ways in which you are clueless about how bad this relationship can be. The fact that you could say that you are a good weight is a measure of what a sane upbringing you had.”
    “You don’t know my father.”
    “I don’t need to know your father. I know Jonathan.”
    Jules did not like Jonathan. It was one of the only sore spots in our friendship.
    “Don’t start,” I said.
    “Agreed,” said Jules, pushing her curls back with her fingers.
    “I’m just afraid.”
    “I know you are. But when you come back here you will have done something really important.”
    “If I come back.”
    Jules squeezed my hand so hard I winced. “This is not
Peter Pan,”
she said. “Your brothers are not the Lost Boys. They can learn how to run a microwave. Your father can learn where the Goddamn dry cleaner is. But no one,” she ended, and her eyes filled, “can help your mother with the shit she’ll be going through but you.”
    “Hire a nurse,” Jonathan said when I called him at the data-processing job he worked two nights a week to pay for law school.
    “She didn’t hire a nurse when I had bronchitis,” I said.
    “Oh Ellen, did Papa George come up with that line? It’s so—so self-sacrificing. It sounds just like him.”
    “Fuck you, Jon,” I said.
    “Oh, you will,” he said, his voice silky, and he described in detail how I would when next he was in Langhorne, which seemed like years from now.
    That was what I was thinking of as I tugged the futon from the back seat of the rental car—all the times we’d laid atop it and worked away, trying to find the places that would drive oneanother half mad, feeling half mad when we succeeded. Like a mummified prom corsage or a lock of hair, the stains on the futon were the memoirs of our life together. There was no place I could possibly imagine putting it that would not disturb the perfect prettiness of my mother’s house.
    It would be conspicuously out of place in my room, which was sponge-painted a pale blue, its windows veiled in flowered chintz. Over my desk were my diplomas, framed and matted, and the certificate from the state essay contest, handed to me hastily by the commissioner of education as the cameras made their
nick-nick
insect sounds. I had written a glib and self-righteous defense of euthanasia, and the conservative Catholic governor, who usually awarded the $1,000 prize, wanted nothing to do with me.
    I spent the money on a hiking trip in Colorado and a leather jacket for Jonathan.
    So I rolled my futon into the garage. Whenever I saw it there, over the next few months, whenever I went out to get a can of oil or a screwdriver, its misshapen bulk in the corner made me tingle, like a spinster peeking into the master bedroom of the house next door, all grim mouth and warm crotch.
    I don’t know how much my mother knew about my sex life, or the rest of my life, for that matter. I don’t know how typical our relationship was, either. Perhaps I know the wrong sort of woman, overcerebral and nervous. I only know that I can tell from the timbre of Jules’s voice on the telephone, edgy and a little higher than usual, that she has just seen or spoken to her mother. I only know that one day I went in to see my adviser at Harvard, a woman who had appeared on television news programs more than once in the role of a Valkyrie, brandishing her almost incendiary intelligence, and found her with her head in her hands. “The tenacious umbilical cord,” she said lightly when I asked if I should come back another time, but her posture had given her away.
    When I considered her dispassionately I knew that, as my friends said, I was lucky in my mother. It was simply that I rarely considered her at all. My mother was like dinner: I needed her inorder to live, but I did not pay much attention to what went into her.
    My father was dessert. He exhibited the kind of dim general interest in my